Over the past few days, my marriage has quickly unraveled. Honestly, though, it’s been unraveling for a few months, but Sunday was the tipping point. I don’t want to get into the details here, beyond the fact that is was Lisa who decided to end it, but neither of us is completely innocent. If you ask either of us, the amount and location of blame will differ some, but we mostly agree that, in the end, the love — the type of love that should be felt between husband and wife — isn’t there anymore. I firmly believe, that if Lisa were to reconsider her decision, we could get back to what we had with some work. Realistically, though, I don’t think that’ll happen. I need to look forward to this new future and cherish, but not mourn or worship the good stuff that we had. Most importantly, we still love and respect each other as friends and, really, that’s pretty great, since we still need to work together in dealing with Grace. She has been our biggest concern; how can we work through this with minimal damage to her?

I’ve got a lot of anger about the situation, what happened, and how things ended, but this is destructive energy that won’t help anything. I’m trying to find ways to deal with it, while still being constructive. To this end, I have an appointment with a counselor this afternoon. Hopefully, he’ll give me some suggestions on how this can be done. I’ve been keeping most of it in when talking with Lis. This has mostly worked, but every-so-often, something snarky and hurtful slips out. Lis is pretty good at taking it, but it does build up and it does hurt her.

Last night, after an especially nasty spat, we were able to collect ourselves and talk about where we go from here. Neither of us — right now, at least — feels especially pressed to leave. We’re still comfortable around each other, though we need to work out comfortable levels of modesty, touchiness, and personal space. We think that, for the time being, Lis will continue to live with us. She’ll take care of Grace through the summer, continuing to be a stay-at-home-mom. Next month, when G starts her final year of pre-school, Lis will look for a full-time job. Luckily, it looks like my job might allow for a certain level of work-at-home time. I need to talk this over with my boss, but I might be able to take her to school, pick her up, and bring her to daycare while Lis is at work. From daycare, I’ll continue into the office. Lis will pick G up when she’s done with work and bring her home. The money Lis earns will go towards daycare and savings. Unless her new job has outstanding healthcare, she’ll remain on mine for the meantime and I’ll continue to share my finances.

Eventually, Lis will have to move out, as the state of Virginia requires that couples with children must live apart for 12 months before a divorce can be issued. Hopefully, Lis will have enough time to save up enough money for a nice place with plenty of room for both her and Grace. The good news — to me — is that as of at least right now, this room for Grace will be for visits. I’ll have physical custody. We’ll share legal custody. We want to try to arrange things where Lis can have an active role in G’s everyday life, but still have her live primarily with me. For the time being, G and I will continue to live in our house, but I think we’ll eventually want to sell it. (Too many memories of dreams of a now-different future, yadda yadda…)

We’ve discussed the possibility of Grace and me moving out of state, probably to be closer to my family in Arizona. This will probably require a lot of planning as neither of us want to be part-time parents. If we do move, we’ll need to find a way for Lis to regularly — at least twice a month, hopefully — be with Gracie. Either Lis comes to us or, as G gets older, she goes to Lis. I can also see G going out to be with Lis for a month or so around the time her family has their annual trip to North Carolina. We’re also a bit concerned about the Arizona school system compared to the Virginia one. While the disparity isn’t as large as we thought, Arizona’s is still the lesser of the two. Regardless, all of this needs to be researched more as it could have a profound impact on G if done wrong.

Well, OK, most of this could have a profound impact on G if done wrong. Sadly, I’m told it has to be done, but if we can work together, we can try to minimize the chances of that happening.

I’ve been playing games with G on the computer over the past month or so. There is the new game that we got her recently that’s based on a movie series she likes. As with most of the games for her age group, it consists of a handful of activities for her to do combined with some reward — usually video clips — that they earn by playing the activities. In this game, playing one activity earns one video clip.

Since G really likes the characters in this game, she’s especially interested in the reward part. She learned on her own that she only has to enter an activity, then exit for it to register as having played an activity, She then goes to the reward area to see another video. Wash, rinse, repeat with the tenacity of a three year old.

Grumpy posted something about losing this “street cred” if heard “singing contemporary folk songs aloud” unless you have a “Street Cred ProtectorÂ®”, such as his new model or my slightly older model. All I can say is, you don’t know anything about losing street cred until you sing one of these songs aloud, not to your Street Cred ProtectorÂ®, but to a cow-orker, which is just what I did today with Raffi’s Banana Phone.

BTW, interesting side note: Searching Google for “banana phone raffi” leads to some interestingresults and that’s just the start. Now, I need to go apply drill to head as this song is stickier than that old favorite, “It’s a Small World” (and no, I’ll be kind and not link to anything; the suggestion was enough.)

This past Sunday was G’s third birthday. We all had a good time and a nice party with friends and family. One of the (many) gifts she got was Cootie. It’s a fun game for three-year-olds. More fun for mommy and daddy, though, is what G calls the game: Booty.

My friend and cow-orker, Grumpy and his wife (Ms Grumpy?) had their first child yesterday. Congratulations to you both and welcome to parenthood.

Enjoy the rest and help while you can at the hospital and with your families around, because once you get home and it’s just the two of you staring down into that tiny, beautiful, precious little face, you are so in for it. I love being a dad, but until you’re in it, it’s just impossible to comprehend how completely it takes over your life. It’s like a freight train and your previous lives just got creamed.

There’s a lot I miss about my old, pre-G life, but I wouldn’t want to trade even one bit of what I have now for what it was like then. It’s amazingly hard work, but amazingly rewarding too. (I’m told that I might rethink that once G’s a teenager, but I’ll enjoy what we have now.) As G approaches three, I can honestly tell you, it just keeps getting better. (Apply above teenager disclaimer here too.)

These are my notes:

Enjoy rest whenever and wherever you can

Pay attention to signs of postpartum depression. From what I’ve read, a lot of women get this and try to hide it out of shame or fear of being seen as weak.

You’ll get used to dirty diapers. Puke on the other hand…./me shivers

There will be plenty of both.

No matter how tough it seems — especially at the beginning, when it’s the middle of the night, the baby’s crying, but not eating and you’re both half-crazed from sleep deprivation — it will get better.

This past Saturday, we went to our friends’ Jen and Matt’s wedding. It was a nice affair (Hmmm, maybe the wrong word to use , but G could have been better behaved. In her defense though, the reception was very late and the food and dancing happened surprisingly late, after the reception started. She didn’t get much sleep during her nap — poopie emergency — and because we thought the food would start soon after the reception started, we didn’t feed her much beforehand. Since Lisa had Matron-of-Honor duties to fufill, I wound up watching (and diciplining) the small one. Welcome to the only photo of the wedding itself that I got. At least it’s pretty decent. It’s too bad G’s meltdown happened before the dancing started.

Yesterday was the first time Thing One went trick-or-treating. Or, as she was saying, “trick-or-meat”ing. She was dressed up as a pirate in a costume made by her mother. We taught her some things to say. “Arrrr,” “Trick-or-treat, matey,” and “Gimme some booty.” Being the good girl that she is, she changed the latter phrase to, “Gimme some booty, please.”

Overall, it was a fun experience. Everyone thought she was soooo cute (Of course she was!) and got a laugh from what she was saying. The only down-side was that she got tired before we got home and got a bit cranky and wanted to be carried. The great thing about her crankiness now though, is that she can be easily distracted. In this case, it was with the mini-maglite I brought with me.

There were some places in the neighborhood that tried hard to scare-up their place. None were as scary as this one place around the corner and down near the community swimming pool. They had a zombie out in front of the house, holding a sign saying, “Four More Years.” Now _that’s_ scary. (And maybe a good comment on the typical Bush voter. )

For exmple:
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The Wiggles
Bear in the Big Blue House
Zoboomafoo
Oobi
Oobi
Maisy
The Wiggles
Sesame Street
Bear in the Big Blue House
Zoboomafoo
Oobi
Maisy
Oobi
The Wiggles
Maisy
Sesame Street
Bear in the Big Blue House
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And then, finally, a show not for Thing One. It’s not just that there’s a lot of her shows constantly being recorded (there are), but that — and this has happend plenty of times before — as soon as we delete a show, that’s the exact episode she wants to watch. So instead of doing the compassionate thing for our TiVo and deleting shows after she watches them, we just keep the list full of her shows, just in case she wants to watch the Maisy episode with the train or the Wiggles with Captain Feathersword doing brain surgery. Because of this, the drive on the TiVo is constantly full or close to it. The average lifespan now of shows not marked “Save until I delete” is about two days.